The head of the company at first refused to listen to so small a child when he did, he cried too. Aged nine, Lind was brought to the attention of a singing master at the Royal Theatre, who was moved to tears. While her mother disapproved of a stage career, she allowed singing lessons. Lind’s extraordinary abilities as a singer were noticed when she was tiny. When was Jenny Lind's extraordinary talent for singing first noticed? At some point, Jenny’s father reappeared and her parents finally married when she was 14. Niclas took no part in his daughter’s upbringing nor, initially, did her mother – Jenny was mostly brought up by surrogate parents. Anna became pregnant, giving birth to her second daughter. Nearby lived one Niclas Jonas Lind, a 21-year-old bookkeeper. In 1819 the two were living in an overcrowded building in the centre of Stockholm. Jenny’s mother Anna Fellborg had an unsuccessful marriage at the age of 19, successfully petitioned for divorce and obtained custody of her daughter, Amelia. The baptismal register for illegitimate children at the church of Sancta Clara in Stockholm records: ‘1820 October 6. Yet Lind reached these heights from an unpromising beginning. In personal terms she was known for her extraordinary acts of charity, giving away more than most other stars earned. She has a most exquisite, powerful and really quite peculiar voice, so round, soft and flexible, and her acting is charming, touching and very natural.’ When and where was Jenny Lind born?
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‘The great event of the evening,’ wrote Queen Victoria after her London debut, ‘was Jenny Lind’s appearance and complete triumph. ‘For me she opened the sanctuary of art.’ In Clara Schumann’s estimation, ‘Lind has a genius for song such as can appear hardly once in centuries’. ‘No book or personality whatever has exerted a more ennobling influence on me, as a poet, than Jenny Lind,’ wrote Hans Christian Andersen. Cultural figures placed her at the pinnacle of her art.
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To describe the extent of her fame we might have to use a term such as ‘global celebrity’ or ‘megastar’.